It All Came Crashing Down
Minor background: I am a pretty affectionate, and at times effeminate, dude. I’m 6’2” and have a pretty “tough-guy” background in that I was in special forces a while ago, and my roommates all served as well, but I also have thin wrists and sit on my friends’ laps and blow kisses to them and stuff. I’m not gay for what it’s worth, I just am me. So while I was in a shop with a roommate a few weeks ago, he saw these really cool shawls that we both couldn’t get out of our heads. So he returned last weekend to buy them and now we have these shawls. Mine makes me look like a Star Wars character and his looks like the Outlaw Josey Wales, these are seriously awesome shawls. The first night we wore them, everybody at the dive bar we went to (re: dudes) thought they were awesome as well.
Then this girl and her friend arrive on an invite from Shawlbro, and it all goes wrong. They are seriously turned off by our sweet shawls. Like, acting pretty weird about them and making comments. Whatever. Around this time, I get a call from my girlfriend. She’s tired and wants to hang out at my place, so I bid these mean girls and Shawlbro adieu and head home. I’m still wearing the shawl when my girlfriend arrives. Well, she’s also really taken aback—she won’t even kiss me until I take it off. After, we get do the deed and go to sleep…and the next morning she starts asking me if I’m gay. And she’s really serious and aggressive about it. I tell her I’m not, and that if I was I’d definitely know it by now, and she counters with her major evidence of the fact that I own a shawl. Anyway, she gets weird and leaves, and then sends me a text later about how she’s sorry and that she “needs to think about what kind of man” she wants, and then doesn’t contact me for days.
So yesterday I invite her out, and it all comes crashing down. She’s stumbling over her words and talking about how she likes tough guys and how she grew up in the south and needs to get used to The Big City, but that she doesn’t know this or that, and eventually I just tell her very politely to get screwed because I’m pretty insulted by this point. On the way back, now that I’m not directly in front of her, I get this long apologetic text from her but the crux of it is that yeah, she’s just not that into me anymore because I wore a shawl. Later on, I tell Shawlbro about this, and apparently he also had a blowout with the girl he was seeing over his shawl that very same night we went out. We are both going to keep wearing the shawls though, they are warm. filterface